How to buy back time

What are you working on right now? Is it in line with the plan you wrote at the start of the of the day week? Or are you following a trail of distracting emails and phone calls as the day slips out of your control?

Time management is something we all strive to improve and as much as we would like to control time, there are still many things that occur unexpectedly and tasks that take longer or are more involved than we first thought.

Have you ever gone to the trouble of logging how you actually spend on different tasks? For example, how many hours per week do you spend on email, compared to the time you spend on activity associated with a larger goal?

For some people, using lists, logs and apps can be a great way to measure how you are spending your time. More organised people than me have said that if you can’t measure something you can’t manage it!

So it may help to find a way to analyse where your time goes as the starting point for managing where you want it to go.

I haven’t signed up for it yet, but I’ve recently been recommended a great sounding time-saving tool at rescuetime.com – it measures the time spent on each software application or website you visit. I’ve been told it works to assess your productivity by assigning a score to each activity.

Apparently it can also block your access to distracting social media sites for periods of time to allow you to focus more. Er hem… I may be a prime contender for that one! Anyone else?